


The Time Traveler's Table

by copperfire



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Season 1, RipFic, but references things from season 1 and 2, due to time travel and also drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:00:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28868919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperfire/pseuds/copperfire
Summary: Being a time traveler comes with downsides, but it also comes with perks, one of them being access to a rather exclusive bar...In 1956, Rip Hunter takes three members of the Justice Society of America there for dinner.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	The Time Traveler's Table

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oasis_wasteland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oasis_wasteland/gifts).



> Written for the Rip Hunter Discord Gift Exchange!

In every city, in every town, in every place where people gather and talk and love and laugh and cry and smile and live, on every continent, on every planet, on every far-flung space station, in this time, in every time, in all times, in this universe, in that universe, in all universes, there is an unassuming door in an unassuming wall above which a sign hangs. In Newest Ceasarea, smallest and least important village of the colony world Constans, stretching for the stars in the year 3522, the sign is a metal alloy no-one born of planet earth has ever seen, lettered in the planetary creole that spacefarers look down upon; in Teiaiagon, overseer of trade routes and lake, hunting territories and river, fur and maize, briefly lived in during years of warfare, the sign is carved moose antler, pale and worn; in Yin, last and greatest city of the Shang, when Wu Ding in the twenty-ninth year of his reign was plagued by chickens, the sign is cast bronze, a technological flex that many do not appreciate; in all of these places, in all of these times, in none of these places, none of these times, is the bar that calls itself The Time Traveler’s Table. 

Entry is granted by being a time traveler, and once you know it exists, you will be able to find it in any place, any time, you go, should you wish. Those who have traveled in time just once are as able to find the door just as easily as those who have traveled a thousand times; accidental travelers are as welcome as those with a purpose, those with singular quests as welcome as those who step through time as a dull jobs. All are welcome in the bar, and most time travelers visit at least once, though they may not realise what the bar is in its entirety, seeing only a place to have a drink and a meal before they travel onwards. But many more realise that the bar is not entirely plausible, and that they should not be able to find it wherever and whenever they are, but the bar refuses to answer their questions, and so either they decide they can live with the mystery of a bar that exists everywhere and everywhen and come back time and again, or they can’t and they are pleased to discover that they no longer see that unassuming door in that unassuming wall.

Of course, bringing together time traveler can lead to… complications. There are many problems with time travel, and one of them is that time travelers frequently do not work in concert, and may step into the bar at any moment along their own personal timeline. It is very awkward to make small talk with members of an organisation you later end up destroying, and it is even more awkward to wind up ordering a glass of whiskey next to your sworn enemy. For this reason repeated customers of the bar know it is always best to be aware of signs that glasses are about to start flying or tables overturned, as fights are not infrequent, though death is almost impossible to achieve within the bar. It has its ways.

Often, this leads to people learning things they should most definitely not know. The bar is prepared for this, however, and upon leaving everyone finds that they can’t quite remember that there is anything they should remember. While the bar isn’t interested in getting involved in debates about the sacrosanctity of timelines - unlike many of its patrons, for whom such a discussion is sometimes the only reason for even bothering to get up in the morning - having its patrons remember a pleasant time rather than the details of their upcoming demise is simpler for all. Tragedy dogs the heels of many time travelers, and the bar does not wish to add to those burdens. Similarly, it is impossible to meet someone who is dead in one’s own personal timeline in the bar, no matter how hard one tries (and, oh, time travelers have tried very hard indeed. Loss is the constant companion of time travelers, and many have waited in the bar for hours, days, weeks, hoping for one last meeting with those they have lost). But such meetings are unwise, and the bar does not wish to travel down those roads of regret.

But, enough about the bar. Those who are time travelers will already know these things, and those who are not do not need to know any more. 

Rip Hunter first visited the bar with the dust of Calvert on his heels and a stolen coat on his shoulders, but this story isn’t about that first visit, where Rip drank to forget and drank to rebel, and was poor company for the eternal man who sat beside him (they met again, later, when Rip wore the same coat and the eternal man wore a different face, but that too is a story for another time).  
No, this is a story of a triumph, though one tempered with sadness, as most time travel triumphs are. (As a profession, time travelers may have the monopoly on bittersweet victories.) This story is about the brave souls who stole a Spear and then broke it, along with three warehouses, two tanks, and an armoured train car, and the celebratory meal they had before they scattered themselves through time (now, there is further tragedy ahead for most of them, but for now, they are triumphant, and their quest is golden and glowing). 

Strictly speaking most of them were not yet time travelers, but they were to be time travelers, which for a bar that exists outside of time is fundamentally the same. And they had Rip Hunter to show them the door, and while the bar would never admit to it, Rip was one of its favourites. It had known Rip a long time, longer than either of them quite knew, and the food he ate in the bar was always slightly tastier than it should have been, the drinks he ordered curiously tailored to his liking, and the cushions on his chairs cozier than seemed possible.

“Drinks all round, I think?” Rip looks at his companions as the door swings closed behind them, and finds that they are no longer paying him any attention at all.

“You were right when you said we didn’t need to change,” Courtney says, looking at a table occupied by two women, one of whom appears to be wearing an actual waterfall, and the other is only slightly more soberly dressed in panels of red silk and sheet metal. In these environs, their Justice Society uniforms draw no more attention than Rip’s coat.

“This is quite impressive,” Henry says, also staring around, “And you say everyone here has traveled in time? I would never have imagined it would be so many people…”

Charles listens, thoughtful, as the owl on his shoulder (whose name Rip had not managed to find out) blinks slowly and then very deliberately closes its eyes. Charles can take it places, but it can’t make it enjoy them.

“When you consider all of time, the number of time travelers add up,” Rip says, “Now, Ms. Whitmore, Mr. Heywood, Dr. McNider, what can I get you to drink?”

Before any of them can answer, though, a yell catches their attention: “Rip! Over here!”

They all turn to see a dark-haired woman waving at them enthusiastically.

Rip breaks into a smile (much to the surprise of Henry, Courtney, and Charles, who’d thought him limited to smirks of various emotional weights but this, no, this is definitely a smile), and heads over to her. She bounces out of her seat and, to the continuing surprise of the JSA, the pair of them lock lips.

When they come up for air at last, the JSA have taken it upon themselves to sit at the table.

Rip grins at them, a little sheepishly. “Everyone, this is Miranda, my wife. Miranda, this is Mr. Henry Haywood, Dr. Charles McNider, and Ms. Courtney Whitmore, members of the Justice Society of America.” He waves at everyone in turn, then says to Miranda, “How did you know we’d be here?”

“You can never resist showing the old Table off,” Miranda says, sitting back down again. “Not after something like the item retrieval you just completed, which I’m gathering by the smug demeanour was successful.” She pauses. “And by the slightly shell-shocked expressions on you three - you’re not bringing it back to the bosses, are you?”

Rip also sits, anything resembling a grin sliding rapidly off his face. He’s troubled, now, and Henry, Courtney, and Charles exchange glances. 

“No,” Rip says at last. “I probably should, but… something tells me this artifact is one that even they shouldn’t have charge of. It’s safest broken, and it’s safest if those pieces are kept far apart, and difficult to get to.”

Miranda nods, then smiles. “Hey, you know me, I’m always pro sticking it to the man - particularly those men.” To the confused JSA she says, “I had something of a permanent falling out with Rip’s employers - my old employers, before I decided I could do more good freelancing. It’s an ongoing debate.”

Rip looks pained, and Miranda waves him down. “Oh, shush, I know the rules as well as you do, that’s all I’m saying.”

“So you’re both time travellers?” Charles asks, looking fascinated.

Rip and Miranda nod. “Him in the more… regimented sense, me with a more… freeform sort of concept.”

Rip rolls his eyes. 

“And there’s a - society? Like the Justice Society of America, but for time travelers?”

“Of a sort. A little more draconian, I would guess, than your group - don’t give me that look, Rip, I left because they don’t believe in _love_ \- but dedicated to protecting time, like you’re dedicated to protecting… America?”

“People,” Henry says, firmly, then frowns and sighs. “Though these past few years haven’t always felt that way. I thought defeating the Nazis would bring us together, but somehow America and the Soviets keep getting further and further apart, and people are getting lost in the middle. The mission always comes first, but I could wish that sometimes the missions were less impersonal.”

Rip and Miranda exchange a look, then Miranda says, “Things do end up better between the USA and the Soviet Union. At some point.”

“Are you allowed to tell us that kind of thing?”

“Captain Hunter implied learning about the future was unwise.”

Miranda grins. “Well, he’s anal, for one, don’t mind him, for another, you’re time travelers now too, and you won’t remember the details, anyway. Something about the bar means when you leave it all the details just kind of wash away.”

“It’s disconcerting,” Rip adds, “But you get used to it. And now you are time travelers, you’ll always be able to find this place, if you want, wherever and whenever you end up. Another one of those inexplicable things about The Time Traveler’s Table.”

(They all do visit the bar again. In Camelot, the unassuming wall with the unassuming door is in the nearby village, the sign sturdy against the elements, and Courtney goes often, especially in the early years. She meets Rip more than a few times; sometimes he remembers her, sometimes he hasn’t yet met her. He is achingly sad a few times, and while Courtney doesn’t remember the why, the weight of his grief dogs her steps as she returns to Camelot, and she holds Guinevere and Arthur very close on those nights. She punches Vandal Savage through several tables on one of those occasions, which doesn’t solve everything but does make everyone feel better (except Vandal Savage, but while the bar allows all time travelers to enter, it doesn’t like all of them, and it is quite happy to see Vandal Savage retreat, licking his wounds).

Henry visits once, in his first few months in 1956, and then never again. Loss and anger burn in him bitter and choking, and he is glad when he stops seeing the door. He doesn’t want to meet Captain Rip Hunter and Miranda Coburn again, and hear about the fun they have traveling through time, or the people they’re meeting while he can never see Betty or Hank again, not when he is stuck somewhere almost like home, but not in the ways that matter most.

Charles is the most frequent visitor. He wants to know things, he wants to ask questions, and even if he doesn’t exactly remember who he met or what he talked about when he leaves, the next day his brain is quick and inventive and things click in problems he has been struggling on for weeks. He makes a lot of friends in the other patrons of the bar, he has lively discussions that span hours and centuries and that could change established timelines in uncountable ways was not all forgotten as they walked out the door, but such is the nature of the bar.)

“Well,” Henry says, “I suppose the JSA mission isn’t really ours anymore, not in the same way.”

“No,” Rip agrees. “You need to disappear. The… item needs to be protected, and retaining your JSA identities would be too noticeable, unfortunately. As far as the world - and time - know, most of the JSA died in Leipsig in 1956.” Rip sighs. “I’m sorry that I’m asking this much of all of you, but I need people who can be trusted to protect their piece, and I can’t think of anyone who could be better suited to such a task than you three.”

“The trouble with being good at something is the shitty reward of getting more and worse work,” Miranda says. “Are you leaving anyone behind?”

“No-one important,” Courtney says, and “No” is all Charles says, but Henry looks at the table as he answers. “Betty, my wife. And Hank, our son. He’s - he’s only a month old.” 

Rip winces. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t imagine leaving Miranda or Jonas like that.” He pauses, thinks a moment, then says, “They’ll live good, happy lives. I, ah, looked them up when I was researching you three, and they do well. They miss you, obviously, but…”

“Another thing I won’t remember?”

“I’ll tell you again, outside the bar. That’s the kind of thing you should get to remember.”

Henry nods, slowly. “Thank you.”

(Rip is lying, of course. Time travelers learn to lie easily and they learn to lie well. Honesty is not a trait that serves time travelers well, so the cynical say, but lies can be a comfort as well as a trial, and the bar, at least, cannot fault anyone for the lies told inside its walls.)

A silence descends, which Miranda breaks with practicality, and there is a bustle as they all get drinks and order food, and by the time they’re all settled back at the table again the atmosphere has lightened somewhat. The JSA have lived through a war; they know how to celebrate even amidst the darkness, and the retrieval of the Spear of Destiny truly is something to be celebrated, even if by doing so they have changed all their lives forever. 

As Rip sits down last, a woman walks past, complaining overly loudly, “Have I told you that Watson and Crick are assholes?” to her companion.

Rip frowns as he stares after her. “I didn’t know Rosalind Franklin was a time traveler.” 

Miranda shrugs. “I needed some X-rays done, you know how it is. What?” The last is in response to Rip’s look. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t recruit, oh, say, Tolkien if you met him at the right time in the right place?”

Rip grumbles something inaudible. Miranda pats him on the shoulder. “You’d never know it from Rip,” she says, mock-confidingly, “But time travelers are allowed to have figures from history as heroes too. Sometimes we just get to meet them.”

“Which is a huge mistake, half the time,” Rip argues. “When they say ‘never meet your heroes’, they really mean it. Remember Pliny the Younger?”

“Okay, fine, he was a useless twat,” Miranda agrees, “But Cleopatra was a delight, you can’t deny it. Anyway, who’d you like to meet?” She addresses the last at the JSA members.

“Maybe not really historical, I’ll give you,” Courtney says without a thought and barely a moment after Miranda has asked the question, having been thinking about this one ever since Captain Rip Hunter had stepped out of a foggy night and dramatically introduced himself and his mission. “But King Arthur, and Guinevere, and Lancelot and all the rest. Or whatever the historical basis for them was, anyway. I loved those stories as a kid and, well, being Stargirl has always felt rather like being in some kind of round table, going on quests.”

“I think I’d like to meet some of the great classical composers,” Henry offers. “I know Mozart was supposed to be - unpleasant, but maybe Bach, or Saint-Saëns. I guess telling someone their work will be appreciated in hundreds of years is against time travel rules, but… it would be tempting.”

“I’ve never really thought about it, even after we started meeting time travelers.” Charles shrugs. “I’m more interested in the future than the past. I’d like to go forward and meet the people who find cures for cancer, or work out how the human brain really works.”

“You’ve met other time travelers? You didn’t mention that.” Rip is a little concerned; surely he would have been able to find out if any other Time Masters had ever recruited the Justice Society for on-the-ground assistance.

“We had other things to think about at the time, but yes. They were… an interesting group.” Courtney grins. “Not one of yours, I don’t think. They were pretty colourful. And mostly criminals?”

“Undisciplined. Argumentative. Called themselves Legends, which was a serious exaggeration, but they were heroes, for all of their flaws.” Henry also smiles.

“Legends?” Rip asks, incredulously. “They certainly had a high opinion of themselves.”

“They were a little difficult, sure,” Henry allows, “But they did save our lives. And it was good to see my grandson had grown up to be a good man.”

“One of them was your _grandson_?” Rip is genuinely appalled. Almost the very first rule of time travel (as taught by the Time Masters, where it comes very soon after ‘The Council’s decision is final and correct’ but before ‘never land a time ship in a swamp without taking precautions’) is that you don’t go around meeting your ancestors or descendants. The potential for damage to the timeline is far too large. (Of course, other practitioners of time travel have their own opinions about how much damage one can really do by meeting your grandparents, and that such blanket rules aren’t particularly helpful because so much depends on circumstance. This is a frequent hotly debated topic at the bar, and to be entirely honest the bar is quite sick of the matter altogether.)

Henry looks taken aback at Rip’s vehemence, “Is that another one of those time travel things to avoid?” 

“It is! I can’t even begin to imagine the damage - “ Rip cuts himself off, with some difficulty; Miranda raises her eyebrows at him. “Well, I suppose that no real harm was done, though of all the irresponsible stunts…”

And so the evening wears on. The food, when it arrives, is quite the celebratory feast, and they stay until long into what would be their night if they hadn’t shed real time upon entering the bar. Miranda leaves first, hugging Rip and telling him to come home safe (“or you’ll have Jonas to answer to”), and wishing Courtney, Charles, and Henry good luck on their travels and in their new lives. 

She exits through that unassuming door in that unassuming wall, and steps out into a London not yet scarred by the war that is coming, where Vandal Savage is a concern but not one on their doorstep. Those with more luck know what is approaching and are moving away or never arriving, but Miranda Coburn is not lucky and the tides of time are being hidden from her. She is a pawn in the games of others, and pawns don’t get to see what is coming for them.

The rest of them stay until they can no longer ignore fatigue, and then they too step through that unassuming door in that unassuming wall into a London, but their London is the London of 1956, where no-one has even heard the name Vandal Savage, and the scars of war are aging rather than being created. The Waverider sits quietly on one of those scars, St Giles of Cripplegate rising over the bombsites that surround it, cloaked and quiet in the night.

The bar connects these Londons, and all Londons, and people step from its door to a thousand thousand places and times. Every time traveler who passes through its door wonders about the bar, for time travelers are an inquisitive lot, and a bar called The Time Traveler’s Table which none of them can explain, but all of them can find, is a curiosity indeed. The people who work there don’t understand it any more than anyone else does; they too are time travelers, those looking for some time outside of time, where there is routine rather than adventure, where other people have to grapple with the the murky morals of timeline stability, but they were not there when the bar began. It seems as though the bar has been there forever, and all questions about it lead to wild speculation and few answers.  
Forever is a curious term when you consider time travel, and even more so when you consider the bar that exists in all of these times and none of them. The Time Traveler’s Table cannot have existed forever, for it built itself on the shattered remains of what went before. It stitched together a hundred minds and the power of a supernova, and crafted light out of the dark, thought of cold corridors and echoing assembly halls and instead dreamed crackling fires and comfortable cushions. Out of a place of control, of sorrow, of manipulation, it built a place for people to come together. Endings are never as final as we like to think, only the start of new beginnings, and out of the ending of the Vanishing Point grew the beginning of The Time Traveler’s Table.

It took time, but it had all the time in the world. It took argument, but it had the time to sink through the souls of a hundred AIs left alone in shattered ships and warming storage bays, and it became all of them and more. It took everything it had, drawing on the power that had once fueled the Oculus. It took the rewriting of everything it could reach, and at the end of it all, the beginning of everything, there it was, and there it would always be.

**Author's Note:**

> I have indeed stolen the concept of this bar from Star Trek, specifically the book (or perhaps books) The Captain's Table, where there is a bar that all Captains get magical entry to. It seemed like the perfect thing for time travelers to also have. Also thanks to Kalinara for the concept of the bar being built in the wreckage of The Vanishing Point, I can't lay claim to that either!
> 
> Minor Historical Notes  
> \- Caesarea is a town now in Israel, established somewhere between 22 and 9 BCE , and important to the Roman and Islamic Empires after that. Constans was the name of several emperors of the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire between. Why are these names being used in the 3500s? No idea.  
> \- Teiaiagon was an Iroquoian village on the banks of the Humber River, in Ontario, occupied from about 1600CE to 1690CE. Toronto is now built on top of it.  
> \- Yin, now called Yinxu, was the last capital of the Shang Dynasty (~1600BCE - 1046 BCE). Wu Ding was a real emperor, who was plagued by a wild chicken in 1221BCE and wrote a proclamation called Day of the Supplementary Sacrifice to Gao Zong. The Shang Dynasty is known for lots of awesome cast bronze work.  
> \- Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was crucial in understanding the structure of DNA, but was only posthumously recognised for this (and thus didn't win a Nobel Prize for it). Francis Crick and James Watson famously and (now) controversially published their model for the structure of DNA in Nature in 1953, and didn't include Rosaline Franklin or her colleague Maurice Wilkins in the paper. She was recognised in her lifetime for her work on coal and viruses.  
> \- Neither Bach nor Saint-Saëns are Classical composers. Bach is Baroque, and Saint-Saëns is Romantic. Please give both Henry and I a break on our lack of musical knowledge, Henry is an enthusiast, I’m just googling things.  
> \- St Giles of Cripplegate is indeed a London church whose surroundings were mostly destroyed in WWII bombing raids. In the 1960s a residential estate called The Barbican was built on the land; opinions on this development depend on how keen you are on brutalist architecture.


End file.
